Charley blinked and it all came into focus. He was lying on his back. Hospital room. Off-white ceiling. Turning his head slightly he saw that the walls were a pastel green. The sound he heard was coming from a bank of medical monitors blinking and beeping at him. There were IV tubes in both his arms.
“We’re awake!”
The nurse’s boisterous voice made Charley jump.
“Had a good rest?” the nurse asked as she peered at the monitors. She was a chubby Hispanic woman with kinky dark hair.
“Whe… wha . ..” Harry couldn’t get his voice to work.
“Relax, Mr. Ingersoll. You’re still full of Demerol; relax and go back to sleep.”
What about Martha? Charley wanted to ask. My kids. But he found he couldn’t get the words out. Instead his eyes closed and he drifted back into blessed sleep.
When he woke again there was a blond young man in a white smock standing beside his bed. He had a stethoscope hanging around his neck. Must be a doctor, Charley thought.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Where am I?” Charley mumbled.
The doctor grinned at him. “I asked you first. But if you must know, you’re in Missoula Community Hospital.”
“Missoula? How’d I get to Missoula?”
“Snowplow found you, called the Highway Patrol. They took you here.”
“When? How long...?”
“Six hours ago,” said the doctor. His cheerful expression sobered. “I’m afraid we had to take four of your toes. You were pretty severely frostbitten. We saved your fingers, though.”
“My wife,” Charley said. “My kids.”
The doctor nodded and patted Charley’s covers. “We’ll talk about them later. Right now we’ve got to do some diagnostics on you. You were in pretty bad shape when they brought you in here.”
“But Martha. Charley Junior. Little Martha.”
“Later,” the doctor said. “Later.”
“Now, how do we go about finding which one of your people tried to screw up this flight?” Harry stared at Colonel Christopher. She was deadly serious.
“It had to be one of your people, Mr. Hartunian,” she insisted. “You know them a helluva lot better than I do.”
Think! Harry demanded silently of himself.
“Well?” Colonel Christopher prodded.
“Whoever it was,” Harry said slowly, thinking it out as he spoke, “did it while he thought we were on a routine test flight.”
“You already told me that.”
“Which means he did it for money. Not to stop us from shooting down the gook missiles. He didn’t know we were going against real missiles when he sabotaged the ranging laser. He’s not a spy; he’s not working for the North Koreans or some other nation.”
“He. Why not she?”
Harry shook his head. “I just can’t picture Taki doing it. Hell, she almost took my head off when I merely suggested the possibility.”
“Maybe she protests too much,” Christopher countered. “The best kind of defense is a good offense.”
Rubbing with finger and thumb at the ache growing between his eyes, Harry went back to his reasoning. “Whoever it was did it to give Anson Aerospace a black eye. Did it for one of Anson’s competitors. Did it for money.”
The colonel nodded encouragingly. “Okay. So which of your nerds has come into some extra money lately?”
Closing his eyes, Harry thought aloud, “Wally likes to bet on the football pools, but he’s just penny-ante. Small-time.”
“The Hispanic kid?” Christopher prompted.
“Angel? He’s strictly a straight arrow. Four kids, nice wife.”
“Mortgage? Debts? College tuitions? With four kids—”
Harry cut her off. “They’re all in elementary school, and Angel’s working on them to get baseball scholarships by the time they’re ready for college.”
“Still…”
“It’s not Angel.”
“That leaves the big guy.”
“Monk.”
“Has he come into some extra money recently?”
Harry leaned back tiredly in the bucket seat. The plane was still shuddering, but the shaking didn’t seem to be getting worse.
“Are we going to make it to Japan?” he asked.
Colonel Christopher smiled tightly. “If I have to get out and push.”
Harry smiled weakly.
“Now what about this Monk guy? Has he been flashing some extra money around lately? Bought a new house maybe?”
Shaking his head, Harry replied, “Hell, Monk’s been living in the same dinky bungalow since I’ve known him. Hasn’t bought a new car in years, drives a beat-up old Chrysler…”
His voice tailed off. Harry remembered that Monk’s wife had bought herself a Mustang convertible. Fire- engine red. Or had Monk bought it for her?
Madelaine worked for Anson, Harry recalled, in the human resources department.
“What is it, Mr. Hartunian?” Colonel Christopher prodded.
He blinked at her. “It’s probably nothing.” He pushed himself up from the seat. “Let me talk to Monk.”
Christopher got to her feet beside him. “It’s him?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. Let me talk to him before we go jumping to conclusions.”
She studied his face for an intense moment, then nodded. “Okay. You do that. I’ve got a plane to fly.”
As she stepped back into the cockpit, Karen Christopher saw that Captain O’Banion’s shirt was dark with perspiration as he sat in the left-hand seat. Even though his hands were in his lap, they were balled tightly into fists. Kaufman was doing the flying, she saw, and the communications officer was clearly afraid to touch the controls.
O’Banion looked relieved as Colonel Christopher leaned between the two seats.
“How’s it going, Obie?” she asked pleasantly.
“She’s flying straight and level,” said the copilot, glancing up at her. “Buffeting a lot, but she’s holding together.”
“Good. Captain, you can go back to your comm station. Thanks for keeping the major company.”
O’Banion pushed himself out of the chair. “You’re entirely welcome, ma’am.”
“How’d you like sitting up here?” Christopher asked as she slipped by him and into the seat. It felt warm, hot almost.
“Makes me think of W. C. Fields,” O’Banion replied.
“The old comedian? How come?”
“He said he wanted on his tombstone, ‘All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’ ”
Christopher laughed. “You don’t want to be a pilot?”
“No, ma’am. You can keep the job. I’ll stick to communications.”
